2

I'm just wondering what the limits for time are. I have a program that always takes exactly 20 ms, so I assume this is the lowest it can measure, but I want to see if there's some sort of documentation of this.

Improve this question

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

The shortest time interval it can measure is 1 jiffy, which is the inverse of the frequency specified in the build options for the kernel (CONFIG_HZ).

Improve this answer
2
  • Is there a website that mentions this somewhere?
    – Brendan Long
    Apr 15, 2010 at 0:35
  • time(1) leads to times(2) which reads "All times reported are in clock ticks." in the DESCRIPTION section. From there that leads to pages that talk about HZ, but that config setting is made obsolete by CONFIG_NO_HZ. So... not sure where from there.
    – Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
    Apr 15, 2010 at 0:43
3

I agree with Ignacio's response however I believe it misses a critical point. Although a jiffy is theoretically the smallest unit it can measure, sometimes very short durations are inaccurate because the underlying hardware does not measure changes in time that quickly. In my experience, anything less than one millisecond cannot accurately be compared to something else (although that figure could be as high as 5 or 10 milliseconds). If you are trying to benchmark a specific operation or program, consider having it run many hundreds or thousands of times then dividing that total time by the number of iterations to find a more accurate value.

Improve this answer
1
  • Actually, though the jiffy is software, the underlying hardware does much better. grep resolution /proc/timer_list
    – oylenshpeegul
    Apr 15, 2010 at 1:50
1

Try this:

gcc -o timetest -x c - <<< "int main() {}"; time ./timetest

On my (old and slow) system, subsequent runs of:

time ./timetest

finish in as little as:

real    0m0.005s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.000s
Improve this answer
1
  • Note: This is as reported by Bash's builtin time. Using /usr/bin/time only reports to hundredths of a second and says "0.00". The results from the zsh builtin are similar. The ksh builtin shows the lowest time (0.000 or 0.001 real).
    – Dennis Williamson
    Apr 15, 2010 at 4:29

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .